Natural Disaster: Floods

A flood occurs when a body of water rises and overflows onto normally dry land. Floods occur most commonly when water from heavy rainfall, from melting ice and snow, or from a combination of these exceeds the carrying capacity of the river system, lake, or ocean into which it runs.

Where: The Netherlands and England
When: 1099

A combination of high tides and storm waves on the North Sea flooded coastal areas of England and the Netherlands, killing 100,000 people.

Where: United States
When: 1889

The Johnstown Flood, in Pennsylvania, was considered one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. After an unusually heavy rainstorm, a dam several miles upriver from Johnstown broke. One out of every 10 people in the path of the flood died, a total of 2,000 people in less than an hour.

Where: Italy
When: 1966

After a heavy rainfall, the Arno River overflowed, flooding the streets of Florence. Many great works of art in the museums were damaged, as was the architecture of the city. In two days, more than 100 people died and the city was covered with half a million tons of mud, silt, and sewage.

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Mothers of Invention

They say necessity is the mother of invention. But mothers are the mothers of these inventions for kids.

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Record-Breaking Foods

Most Noodle Strings: Simon Sang Koon Sung of Singapore really knows how to use his noodle. He made 8,192 strings of noodles from a single lump of dough in 59.29 seconds. That’s a rate of 138 noodles a second.

Largest Custard-Pie Fight: In 2000, 20 people at the Millennium Done in London, England, threw 3,312 custard pies in three minutes.

Longest Bean: Harry Hurley, of North Carolina, has a green thumb—a big one. In 1997, he grew a bean that measured 4.3 ft long.

Largest Ice-Cream Sandwich: At a promotional event in 1998 in Dubuque, Iowa, an ice-cream sandwich was made that weighed 2,460 pounds.

Largest Chinese Dumpling: In 1997, a dumpling weighing 1,058 pounds was made to celebrate the reunification of Hong Kong and China. No word on whether it was steamed or fried.
Most Expensive Meal: No, it wasn’t in McD’s. In 2001, six people in London spent a total of $62,138 on a meal in a restaurant named Petrus. Most of the money was spent on bottles of rare wine.

Largest Breakfast: In 2001, in Taiwan, 23,291 hungry people wolfed down 1,247 gallons of milk and 4,232 pounds of bread.

Longest Sandwich: Created in Italy in 2004, the loaf measured 2,081 feet in length. It was made of 2,028 pounds of flour, 112 gallons of water and 55 pounds of salt. Packed in the sandwich were 1,206 pounds of salami and mortadella, a type of cheese. The super sandwich weighed 34,275 pounds and was eaten by 19,000 people. Now that’s what we call a real hero sandwich!

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The Strange Ingredients in Fireworks

Fireworks for the 4th of July are all about light, color and sound. But inside, there are some bizarre ingredients, from aluminum to Vaseline and even the stuff of rat poison.

An ancient mix of black powder, essentially gunpowder little changed from its invention in China a millennia ago, gets each rocket in the air by creating pressure in gas trapped in a tube, or mortar.

Two fuses are lit at once: one to ignite the black powder, and another that burns slower, creating a well-timed explosion high in the sky.

The shells of commercial fireworks contain a powdery concoction of chemicals that produce the bangs and the whistles, as well as the pretty effects. Tubes, hollow spheres, and paper wrappings work as barriers to compartmentalize the effects. More complicated shells are divided into even more sections to control the timing of secondary explosions.

Big booms and whistles come from flash powder. Once used for flashes in photography, it is a combination of fuel-like metal and a chemical that feeds oxygen to fire up the fuel. Different combinations of metals and oxides produce a whole array of sounds.

While ancient Greeks and Romans used bismuth in their beauty care products and coins, chemists add bismuth trioxide to the flash powder to get that crackling sound, dubbed "dragon eggs." Ear-splitting whistles take four ingredients, including a food preservative and Vaseline.

The variety of color in a fireworks show depends on the mix of metals.

* Copper produces blue sparks.
* A mix of strontium salts, lithium salts and other stuff makes red.
* Aluminum and titanium put the white stars in an aerial flag.
* Barium, also used in rat poison and glass making, makes green.
* Calcium burns orange and sodium, yellow.

In recent years, chemists have worked to develop more environmentally friendly fireworks, in part because one ingredient, perchlorate, was found in higher than normal concentrations in a lake where fireworks were shot off, and the chemical is known to cause thyroid problems in humans.

Meanwhile, to light up a red, white, and blue flag, chemists can lay out the emblem's design on wax paper. The pattern you see up in the air, whether it's a smiley face or a bow tie, mirrors the arrangement of the metals in the shell.

Because the flag, or any other pattern, shoots out from the shell as a two-dimensional image, people watching the show from different angles can't always tell what they're looking at. To make sure everyone has a good view, pyrotechnists tend to send duplicates into the sky at the same time.

You can see fireworks before you hear them because light travels faster than sound.

Source: LiveScience

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The World's Smallest Robot

Researchers have built an inchworm-like robot so small you need a microscope just to see it. In fact about 200 hundred of them could line up and do the conga across a plain M&M. The tiny bot measures about 60 micrometers wide (about the width of a human hair) by 250 micrometers long, making it the smallest untethered, controllable microrobot ever. "It's tens of times smaller in length, and thousands of times smaller in mass than previous untethered microrobots that are controllable," said designer Bruce Donald of Dartmouth University. "When we say ‘controllable,' it means it's like a car; you can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go. It doesn't drive on wheels, but crawls like a silicon inchworm, making tens of thousands of 10-nanometer steps every second. It turns by putting a silicon 'foot' out and pivoting like a motorcyclist skidding around a tight turn."

Because it makes use of this innovative bending movement and is untethered, it can move freely across a surface without the wires or rails that restricted the mobility of previously developed microrobots. The caterpillar strategy also helped the researchers avoid a common problem in microrobotics. "Machines this small tend to stick to everything they touch, the way sand sticks to your feet after a day at the beach," said Craig McGray of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. "So we built these microrobots without any wheels or hinged joints, which must slide smoothly on their bearings. Instead, these robots move by bending their bodies like caterpillars. At very small scales, this machine is surprisingly fast." To get around, the robot makes use of two independent microactuators – the robot's "muscles." One is for forward motion and the other for turning. It doesn't have pre-programmed directions. Instead, it reacts to electric changes in the grid of electrodes it moves on. This grid also supplies the microrobot with the power needed to make these movements.

This microrobot and similar versions that could be developed might eventually ensure information security, inspect and make repairs to integrated circuits, explore hazardous environments, or even manipulate human cells or tissues.

Source: LiveScience

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Invention Allows Humans to Breathe Like Fish

Alan Izhar-Bodner, an Israeli inventor, has developed a way for divers to breathe underwater without cumbersome oxygen tanks. His apparatus makes use of the air that is dissolved in water, just like fish do.

The system uses the "Henry Law" which states that the amount of gas that can be dissolved in a liquid is proportional to the pressure on the liquid. Raise the pressure - more gas can be dissolved in the liquid. Decrease the pressure - gas dissolved in the liquid releases the gas. This is exactly what happens when you open a can of soda; carbon dioxide gas is dissolved in the liquid and is under pressure in the can. Open the can, releasing the pressure, and the gas fizzes out.

Bodner's system apparently uses a centrifuge to lower pressure in part of a small amount of seawater taken into the system; dissolved gas is extracted. The patent abstract reads: A self-contained open-circuit breathing apparatus for use within a body of water naturally containing dissolved air. The apparatus is adapted to provide breathable air. The apparatus comprises an inlet means for extracting a quantity of water from the body of water. It further comprises a separator for separating the dissolved air from the quantity of water, thereby obtaining the breathable air. The apparatus further comprises a first outlet means for expelling the separated water back into the body of water, and a second outlet means for removing the breathable air and supplying it for breathing. The air is supplied so as to enable it to be expelled back into the body of water after it has been breathed.

Human beings have been thinking about how to breathe underwater since they started swimming. This long-held desire plays an important part in one of the first great science fiction novels, Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It consists of a reservoir of thick iron plates, in which I store the air under a pressure of fifty atmospheres. This reservoir is fixed on the back by means of braces, like a soldier's knapsack.

More recently, I distinctly remember an episode of the sixties sf series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in which a scientist decides that the best way to breathe underwater is to give himself gills. Alas, once equipped with gills, and fully acclimated to life in the sea, Dr. Jenkins and his associate lie in wait outside the submarine Seaview, converting every diver who emerges from the ship into mermen.

And, of course, everyone remembers the scene in which intrepid Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jin don pencil-sized breathing masks to explore the swamp lakes of Naboo in The Phantom Menace. This trick is used again in the most recent Star Wars movie.

Source: LiveScience

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Inventors and Inventions

1. Malpighi, Marcello - 1628-1694, Italian Physiologist, founded microscopic anatomy; first to trace the course of blood through the human body; studied insect anatomy.

2. Newton, Isaac - 1642-1727, British Scientist, invented differential and integral calculus; originated the idea of universal gravitation; worked in optics, developing an improved telescope; formulated the 3 laws of motion.

3. Oersted, Hans Christian - 1777-1851, Danish physicist; founded science of electromagnetism; discovered that a magnetic needle is deflected by electric current; the oersted unit is named for him.

4. Purkinje, Johannes E. - 1787 - 1869, Czech physiologist, discovered ciliary movements in vertebrates and ganglionic bodies in the brain; the Purjinje cell, in brain cortex is named for him.

5. Raman, Sir Chandrasekhara V. - 1888 - 1971, Indian Physicist, Nobel Prize in Physics - 1930, for discovery of frequency changes in light scattered by a fluid medium.

6. Seebeck, Thomas J. - 1770 - 1831, German Physicist; discovered thermoelectricity; developed the thermocouple to measure temperature.

7. Tombaugh, Clyde W. - 1906, US Astronomer; discovered the planet Pluto in the position predicted by Percival Lowell.

8. Urey, Harold Clayton - 1893, U.S. Chemist; Nobel Prize in Chemistry - 1934, for the discovery of deuterium and other radioactive isotopes.

9. Virchow, Rudolf - 1821 - 1902, German pathologist; founded the science of cell pathology.

10. Wilson, Charles T.R. - 1869 - 1959, Scottish Physicist; Nobel Prize in Physics - 1927, for invention of the cloud chamber to trace ionized particles.

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